cantab

How about the Chicago Gap, since astronomer George Ellery Hale was born in Chicago.

RAID makes for a pretty rubbish backup. It'll save you from a hard drive failure, but not from any of the many other things that could cause data loss. Like Camacha says, RAID isn't about keeping your data safe but about keeping your system running. If you have a PC that you cannot afford unexpected downtime on then RAID is appropriate.

I've found summer great for seeing satellites, it must be because of the day/night cycle. If I'm out looking at the sky chances are I'll see a bunch.

I think an art pass to make Dres something more inspired by Ceres and Vesta would help a lot, now we have good images of both. Vesta's pretty neat with its big crater and its cracks, Ceres maybe a bit boring by comparison except for the shiny patches, and a sort of combination of the two could make a nice world. And maybe if and when it's possible give it some cometary jets, since we now know the division between asteroids and comets is rather blurred.

I've seen it a fair few times, you really can't miss it when it passes over. I've tracked it in binoculars but they weren't very good ones. To track it manually at any decent magnification is pretty much impossible, it's a tall order even for automatic mounts.

That wouldn't be RSS, it would just be miniature rockets. You can scale a rocket up or down however you like and it has the same delta-V. If you don't change the size of the solar system then you don't change the delta-V needs. The atmosphere is only a minor part of the delta-V needs.

Method 0: Don't. In the majority of cases your inclination doesn't matter much. You'll take a small delta-V penalty on an airless landing and on takeoff to the same orbit but that's something your safety margins should cover, and if not you can have the previous stage or the orbiter help with the deorbit and landing burns. And if you aren't even landing then that's irrelevant anyway.

To launch awkward payloads in general I suggest putting them between two or more rocket stacks. That means that you won't have drag up front trying to flip your rocket, though you might be draggy overall so pack extra delta-V. If there's a mass imbalance consider individually tweaking engine thrust limiters. I land large rovers on their wheels. You can either have the chutes and/or engines integral to the rover, or on a decouplable skycrane, pods, or similar. Small rovers can be stuck on the side of a multi-engine lander, again using thrust limiters to maintain balance, or can be carried in a service or cargo bay. Contracts to run experiments at multiple close-together points on the ground can appear. If the experiment is something like a seismic survey you're not going to do that with an EVA Kerbal. (Well, unless you're using KIS, but it should never be any surprise that mods mess with game balance).

What's so bad about Dres? One word: Jool. Dres is one planet, there's nothing particularly wrong with it except maybe being too similar to Ike, but with Jool being a whole mini solar system to explore and no longer or harder to reach it's easy to see why Dres gets passed by. It's still the only stock body I've never touched the surface of.

When it stops being gravitationally bound to the Sun.Now that's a bit of a fuzzy criterion. The Sun and other stars are all moving through the galaxy, so the radius of the Sun's Hill Sphere won't be constant, but we should be able to calculate a typical value. That a passing star could eject a planet if it passed by just right doesn't disqualify said planet, after all such ejection is possible if unlikely for the eight planets we know. But an object too far away will indeed be tugged out of solar orbit by the gravity other stars that are not especially close to the Sun.

KAS is still up to date. It's now been "split" into two mods, KIS (Kerbal Inventory System) handles moving parts around and attaching/removing them from ships, while KAS proper has parts like struts and winches for use with KIS.

We recently had a computer in our office infected by such a piece of "ransomware", specifically "Cryptowall 3.0", and I now need to thoroughly check our network to ensure no other computers are affected and to take protective measures. To answer a few questions: Distribution is by the usual methods. Phishing emails, drive by downloads from compromised websites, perhaps USB sticks. I suspect emails that were spoofed as being sent from an employee in our case. Installation by other botnets is possible too, though I would speculate most botnet operators don't want to be so overt. The latest versions are known to attack all mapped drives, which includes USB drives and mapped network shares, and will to sabotage the Windows Volume Shadow Service. They may also be able to attack non-mapped shares that they can get write access to. I am as yet unsure if it makes particular efforts to thwart data recovery software. The criminals behind the malware only accept payment in Bitcoin, precisely because there is no way to reverse those payments. You are unlikely to have any legal grounds to chargeback the Bitcoin purchase, and if you did that would only hurt the Bitcoin exchange, the criminals would still have their funds. Paying the ransom may or may not enable you to get your data back. The software and decryption key do typically exist, but these are organised criminal gangs we are talking about, they're perfectly capable of taking your money and running. Or of letting you decrypt your files then promptly re-infecting your PC. The encryption claimed to be used is a public algorithm known to be essentially impossible to crack with publicly known and available technologies. The only plausible way of decrypting the files is if law enforcement agencies get hold of the keys. As far as backups go, any system that allows the clients unrestricted access to the backup storage location is vulnerable to this sort of malware. It can be defended against by the backup location - be it a server, NAS, cloud service, or even theoretically drive - taking responsibility for keeping previous versions of files that are modified or deleted and not accepting any instruction to change that behaviour from the clients. The backup infrastructure itself could be directly attacked, and the defence against that is offline (and preferably offsite) backups. The infection has been something of a wake-up call to me, making me realise how much important business data is being saved on workstations and how few employees handle their own backups. I intend to implement BackupPC, http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ , which uses a "pull" approach where the backup server does all the work so the backups will naturally be resistant to tampering. There are some resources and tools that are designed to protect against Cryptolocker and similar malware. My understanding is they work by enabling security features included in Windows to restrict what programs can be run, an approach usually overlooked by regular antivirus which instead focuses on scanning files for malware. http://www.thirdtier.net/2013/10/cryptolocker-prevention-kit/ Cryptoprevent: http://bit.ly/1KszbbR (Sorry for Bitly link, the forum regards the original web address as containing a swear word and censors it out)

KER can hurt performance. It's usually fine, but if you have very complicated staging there might be issues when you have the VESL page open.

To keep you on your toes, and make sure that you read the contract before clicking yes. That's a really good lesson to learn for life in general. And at least that contract is possible, if unlikely to be profitable. There have been outright impossible contracts in the past, such as being asked to take a science reading "in space" at an altitude that puts you in the atmosphere.

Sacré bleu! What is this friction? Between these works of science fiction. You've all had enough turns, And I'm sure you think you're cool Now step aside for Jules Verne, I'm the one who begun it all! I will knock you round the world in eighty kicks. My space guns are no Bull, but you're all lunatics. Jeb call yourself an Orbiter? You circle tiny planets! Meg your films just took the Michael, shoulda stayed within your comics. Kraken you're just a Squad of bugs, you wouldn't scare my NaN, Unicron you called yourself a god? You fell in a cosmic garbage can. Now it's time to journey to the centre of this rap war, But you know the only victor is to be the French author, Compared to all you children I am twenty thousand leagues ahead, And my works, they'll still be printing them when your copyright is long dead.

You can certainly test a Duna plane on Kerbin. Lighten your plane, probably by short fuelling it, to simulate Duna's lower gravity. Then ignore the altitude in metres and instead pay attention to the pressure where you are flying and how that compares to pressures on Duna. About 10 km up on Kerbin is comparable to datum on Duna for example. Of course there will be some differences, for example the tests will have reduced inertia as well as reduced weight.

Well Kerbin has a sea level pressure of around 100 kPa / 1 atm. If Kerbals are like humans then with appropriate training they should be fine in a pressure as low as 40-50 kPa, assuming a similar oxygen content in the air and lack of other toxic gases. Serran's "sea level" pressure is 45 kPa so it's reasonable for Kerbals to walk around helmetless there. What really counts is the "partial pressure" of oxygen, so if the atmosphere has a high oxygen percentage it can be breathable with a lower total pressure.A minor snag is knowing what units Texture Replacer needs, you may need to experiment. There's an upper limit to tolerable pressures too, that's why scuba divers sometimes use special gas mixes, they can be safely breathed at higher pressures than normal air. For Laythe my hypothesis is the air is too rich in carbon dioxide. It doesn't matter how much oxygen there is, if the CO2 levels are above a couple of percent your body can't exhale CO2 and you suffocate. Since the stock system puts Laythe so far from the Sun, it seems sensible for it to have a lot of a greenhouse gas. Of course New Horizons totally changes this; maybe a case for NH!Laythe having breathable air?

EVAing in space. I'd done alright up until then, made it into orbit by a process of trial and error and addition of more boosters, but on my first EVA I just went flying off and got hopeless lost in space. I was mashing on the jetpack controls shooting around without a hope of getting back to my ship.

The heat system is buggy as heck, but getting hot when close to the Sun is intended. Considering that Kerbol is around 500 Mm across, getting within 1 Mm of its surface is clearly extremely close. Even 1 Gm is about five times closer than Moho.

Haumea rotates quickly, the shape we see is in hydrostatic equilibrium. An object of its size and shape that weren't rotating so fast would go back to being spherical(ish) pretty quickly.

After five failed attempts, it's Mission Accomplished for my Carts program. To land a probe on Serran and return it safely to Kerbin Between the unknowns of a new world and the pressure of quickloading disabled, this has been one of the tensest and most exciting missions I've done in KSP in a long time. Whether it's opening the chutes a mere 2000 metres from the ground and still doing over 300 m/s, or taking off knowing that I only get one chance at the ascent or I'll be reflying the whole mission, or watching the temperatures climb on Kerbin re-entry with a perished heatshield, it was truly heart in mouth stuff. And capped off by Serran being breathtakingly beautiful. In the event this was probably rather overbuilt, despite an atrocious Serran ascent profile I had loads of surplus delta-V. But better too much than too little. Think I need a break now. Perhaps target Aptur and the Mun, and maybe send some interplanetary probes on their ways.

Trim. Hold down Alt (on Win) or RShift (on Lin) and the WASDQE keys to dial it in, X resets. FAR Wing Leveller. Comes with FAR. Fine controls. Hit Caps Lock. With those three you can fly OK with the keyboard.

47 seconds to circularise isn't bad, but if you want quicker pack more thrust. Of course that means your upper stage will be heavier so you then need a bigger lower stage for it.

Eve used to be simple to land on. Not any more now we have re entry heating, since Eve's greater mass makes your approach and orbital speeds the fastest of any place you can land. Not that Tylo is easy by any means.

Eeeeeepic Rap Battles of History! The name's Jebediah I'll make this robot cry-a When I'm lighting up the boosters Flame this old transforming toaster I'll be adding on some struts When I'm kicking metal butts You'll never win, that's just a con I've got my shades and my sass on.